Inside Jean Tatlock and Oppenheimer’s Passionate Love Affair
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Years before he became known as the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer worked as a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, when he met who became perhaps the greatest love of his life.
Her name was Jean Tatlock, and just as she captured the famed physicist’s heart, their romance has captured the imaginations of historians for nearly a century. And they aren’t the only ones. Tatlock was portrayed by Florence Pugh, alongside Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer, in the 2023 film Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan. The movie won five Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, including Best Motion Picture - Drama, and is expected to garner several Oscar nominations later this month.
Watch Oppenheimer on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, or Vudu.
Affiliated with the Communist Party, Tatlock is often credited with introducing Oppenheimer to radical politics, something that haunted him in his later life and career. Despite their 10-year age gap, and though they were separated by the time he led the famous Manhattan Project, Tatlock had an undeniable impact on Oppenheimer’s life, and her tragic death weighed on him as he began his work on the atomic bomb.
“A free-spirited woman with a hungry, poetic mind, she was always the one person in the room, whatever the circumstances, who remained unforgettable,” according to American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.
Meeting Oppenheimer
Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1914, Tatlock was the second child of J.S.P. Tatlock and Marjorie Fenton. Her father, who had a docorate from Harvard University, was an acclaimed English professor and literary scholar and was considered a foremost expert on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, according to Brotherhood of the Bomb by Gregg Herken.
Jean inherited her father’s intellect. Before attending Vassar College in 1931, she took a year off to travel in Europe, staying with a friend in Switzerland who was a devoted follower of psychologist Carl Jung. After meeting a close-knit community of psychoanalysts during the trip, she decided to study psychology herself, according to Bird and Sherwin.
After graduating from Vassar in 1935, she studied at the Stanford Medical School, where her intellect and good looks intimidated the other classmates. They also caught the interest of Oppenheimer, then a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where Tatlock completed her prerequisites before enrolling at Stanford.
Oppenheimer and Tatlock began a passionate and intense romance in 1936, when she was 22 and he was 32. The decade age gap didn’t seem to matter. A friend described Tatlock as Oppenheimer’s “truest love” and said he was “devoted to her,” according to Bird and Sherwin. He reportedly proposed to Tatlock twice, though she turned him down.
Tatlock was impressed with Oppenheimer’s knowledge of English literature, and she introduced him to the poetry of John Donne. It’s widely believed the Trinity test—the first detonation of the nuclear weapon in 1945—was named after a Donne poem and inspired by Tatlock, according to The First Atomic Bomb by Janet Farrell Brodie.
Communist Affiliations
Tatlock was a dues-paying member of the Communist Party of the United States of America while dating Oppenheimer, an association that would later bring a great deal of scrutiny to the famed physicist. Tatlock wrote for the Western Worker, a major West Coast communist publication, and she introduced him to several prominent members of the party, according to Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center by Ray Monk.
“I find I am a complete Red when anything at all,” Tatlock wrote to a friend, according to American Prometheus. She also pushed Oppenheimer to move from mere theory to action, and when he commented that he would have to settle for staying on the periphery of political struggles, Tatlock remarked, “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t settle for anything.”
However, Oppenheimer denied that Tatlock was solely responsible for his political interests or affiliations, noting that he first read about Soviet communism after his father lent him a book on the subject before he met Tatlock. According to Bird and Sherwin’s American Prometheus, Oppenheimer described Tatlock’s communist involvement as “on-again, off-again affairs and never seemed to provide for her what she was seeking. I do not believe that her interests were really political.”
From 1939 onward, Oppenheimer claimed he only saw Tatlock on rare occasions, and in 1940, he wed Katherine Puening, more commonly known as Kitty Oppenheimer, to whom he was married the rest of his life. However, he and Tatlock remained “the closest of friends and occasional lovers,” according to Bird and Sherwin, and she would phone him for comfort during her occasional bouts of depression.
By 1943, Tatlock was a pediatric psychiatrist at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, at the start of what seemed to be a promising career. The 29-year-old was also being treated for clinical depression, which might have worsened when Oppenheimer drastically reduced contact with her after becoming director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that year, according to Bird and Sherwin.
A Tragic Death
Tatlock was placed under surveillance by the FBI due to her relationship with Oppenheimer and past involvement with communist politics. When Tatlock and Oppenheimer had one last meeting in June 1943, she confessed that she still loved him and wanted to be with him. Unbeknownst to her, FBI agents monitored the entire visit, according to Monk’s biography.
“For reasons of love and compassion, he had become a key member of Jean’s psychological support structure—and then he had vanished, mysteriously,” Bird and Sherwin wrote in American Prometheus. “In Jean’s eyes, it may have seemed as if ambition had trumped love.”
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Tatlock died by suicide on January 4, 1944, at age 29. Her father discovered her body after entering her San Francisco apartment through a window after she didn’t respond to the doorbell. He found her lying in the bathroom, her head submerged in a partially-filled bathtub, with a suicide note on the dining room table, according to Monk.
“I am disgusted with everything,” the note read, according to Bird and Sherwin. “To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t.”
One of the first people to learn of her death was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, due to the agency’s surveillance, according to Monk. Oppenheimer was despondent upon hearing the news. Due to the unusual circumstances around her death and the FBI surveillance, many have speculated that Tatlock was murdered, but most of her loved ones believe the cause of death was suicide.
Tatlock’s relationship with Oppenheimer was used as evidence against him in 1954, when the United States Atomic Energy Commission held security hearings that explored his communist associations and other past actions. Oppenheimer lost his security clearance as a result of the hearing, effectively ending his formal relationship with the U.S. government.
Stream Oppenheimer Now
Oppenheimer is directed and written by Christopher Nolan. Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer, with Florence Pugh tackling the role of Jean Tatolock. Other cast members include Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, and Kenneth Branagh.
You can rent or purchase the movie on Prime Video, Apple TV+, and other major streaming platforms.
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